Frequently Asked Questions
Social Questions Why Can't My Neighbors Send My Gift Request? One thing that I have noticed while playing these games is that many of my friends do not seem to understand the gift system. As it is not a very straightforward system, I wanted to try and explain it here. In both games, gifts can be sent to neighbors once per day. Once you send a gift to a friend, you will not be able to send this friend another gift until 24 hours have elapsed. Where this becomes tricky is that both the player's time of request, and the neighbor's time of response operate on different timers. For example, let's say that your friend Mary requests a wrench from you at 3:00 AM in your time zone, at which point you are asleep and thus are not able to answer the request. (Keep in mind that players from all over the world enjoy these games, so your friends may live in time zones that are as much as 12 hours different from your own.) When you wake up at 7:00 AM, you check the game, see that Mary has requested a wrench, and press the "Send" button to fulfill her request. This means that Mary's'' request time'' was 3:00 AM, but your'' fulfillment time'' was 7:00 AM. Now, because the request time and fulfillment time operate on different timers, Mary will be able to request a wrench from you again at 3:00 AM the following day. However, you will not be able to answer that request for 4 more hours, even though you will be able to see the message in your inbox immediately at 3:00 AM when Mary sent it. Again, this is because you last gifted at 7:00 AM, thus you must wait 24 hours until you can send another gift. If you were awake at 3:00 AM to see the request come through, what you will see is that Mary is requesting a wrench, but the "Send" button is grayed out. At 7:00 AM, the "Send" button will turn green and allow you to fulfill the request, because it has now been 24 hours since the time of your last gift. As you can see, this can result in a large delay between request time and fulfillment time. This delay does not mean that your neighbors are necessarily ignoring you. On the contrary, it means that the games are designed in a way that creates problems with timeliness, even if you have extremely responsive and helpful neighbors. Similarly, this also means that if you are locked out from requesting a gift from a friend, posting a message to that friend's guestbook that says, "will you please send me a wrench?" usually will not work. The reason behind this is because the response follows the request. (In other words, you make the request, then ''the friend sees the request and responds.) If it has not even been 24 hours since you requested, it has likely also not been 24 hours since the friend last responded. In this case, simply wait and send the request after your 24-hour period has elapsed. To make matters even more complicated, let's say that you have 75 very helpful neighbors who frequently stop by your place to leave you tips and to help your appliances. Each action that a helpful neighbor takes generates a message in your inbox. Unfortunately, the inbox can only hold so many messages at one time before older messages drop off, or are deleted as they are replaced by newer ones. So let's say that Mary requests that wrench at 3:00 AM, at which time you are going to be asleep for 4 more hours. Let's also say that, in those 4 hours, 25 neighbors stop by your place to leave tips and/or help appliances. Those 25 neighbors will very likely generate enough messages to your inbox that they will overwrite, or push off, Mary's 3:00 AM gift request by the time you awaken. In this case, you won't even see that Mary has requested anything, and Mary might be left wondering why you didn't respond. Hopefully this all makes sense, and sheds some light onto why your neighbors may either not respond, or seem inconsistent in their responses. It is not always the neighbor's fault; rather, the games are not well-designed for this. Strategy Questions 'How Do I Keep Food on My Counters? '''Overview I like to keep my counters constantly stocked when possible, because I'm a sucker for decorating and I think that the food is pretty and consider it part of my decoration. Therefore, I try to keep my counters stocked and organized in a nice order by either item size, type or something else. Today, a friend took note of this and left me a question on my guestbook. The friend asked, "how do you keep food in your restaurant bakery all the time? I cook my longer timed food at night and still run out." Being that the answer to this question is a little more involved than what I can post to a guestbook, given the character limit of each guestbook post, I offered to answer it here. First, we must understand that there are different variables by which we can analyze a recipe's efficiency: experience per hour of cook time, quantity produced per hour of cook time, profit per hour of cook time, and something that I will get into later but not here: profit per hour of cook time, assuming that a fixed number of appliances are simultaneously working around the clock to produce the same recipe at the same time. Anyhow, in this case we must look at quantity produced per hour of cook time. When we analyze this statistic, we can see that some recipes are clearly winners, while some perform quite poorly. 'Quantity Per Hour' For example, let's look at Coffee. Coffee takes 5 minutes to make, and gives 525 servings per batch, giving it a quantity per hour of 6,300. You can determine this number by dividing the number of servings by the number of minutes divided by 60 (in order to convert the minutes to hours). In other words, it looks like this: 525/(5/60). This means that if you were to use a single mixer and make Coffee for one hour without interruption, that mixer could produce 6,300 servings of Coffee within that hour. (This is not taking into account the rate at which customers are consuming Coffee in that hour, but that's a discussion that I will get into at another time.) Similarly, if you made Coffee on ten mixers simultaneously for one hour without interruption, you could gross 63,000 servings in that hour. As you can see, Coffee is a winner. In fact, Coffee has the highest quantity produced per hour of cook time of any recipe that is currently in the game. Now let's take a look at a poor producer, such as Chocolate Marshmallow. Chocolate Marshmallow takes 8 hours to make, and gives 245 servings per batch, giving it a quantity per hour of 31. You can determine this by dividing the number of servings by the number of hours. (In this case, the cook time is already stated in hours, so we do not need to convert minutes to hours). In other words, it looks like this: 245/8. This means that if you were to use a single oven and make one batch of Chocolate Marshmallow, that oven would effectively produce 31 servings per hour of cook time, since it takes 8 hours to make that recipe. Similarly, if you had 10 ovens producing Chocolate Marshmallows simultaneously, you could gross 2,450 Chocolate Marshmallows after 8 hours, which translates into roughly 310 per hour of cook time. As you can see when comparing this recipe to Coffee, Chocolate Marshmallow has a horrible rate of return in terms of quantity. Basically, we're looking at 6,300 servings per hour versus 31 servings per hour. That's a dramatic difference! 'Practical Application' Now you might be saying at this point, "but I can't make Coffee all day or I'd never eat, sleep or get anything done at all!" And you would be right. Here is where data analysis comes into play. What I have found helpful is to create an Excel database wherein I list the statistics for each recipe (item name, appliance, cost, servings, experience, price, and cook time) and then I have several columns wherein I analyze the data (profit per batch, profit per serving, servings per hour, profit per hour, experience per hour and so forth). I also include an efficiency per day calculations based on the number of appliances producing but, again, that's a topic for another day. Anyhow, what I can do with this database is filter, sort and analyze. For example, I can filter the recipes by 8 hours or greater cook time, then sort the results by highest servings per hour. When I do this, I can see that for all recipes that take 8 hours or more to cook, Sweet Filled Bread is the winner in terms of quantity produced per hour of cook time. Sweet Filled Bread gives 2,310 servings over a 10 hour period, meaning that it grosses 231 servings per hour of cook time. While 231 servings per hour is certainly nowhere near as stellar as Coffee's 6,400, it is at least much better than Chocolate Marshmallow's 31 servings per hour. Given this information, Sweet Filled Bread is the best choice to cook overnight if you're purely looking for a high quantity of product. Similarly, one hour recipes such as Vampire Fruit Smoothie and Hot Cross Buns are also very high quantity producers, and do not require you to swipe and tap every 5 minutes. Unfortunately, the two that I just mentioned are pitiful gold earners, so you must analyze the data and find recipes with a good balance between quantity and profit. 'Things to Consider' So the take-away lesson here is to be mindful of how efficient each recipe is. Just because a recipe takes longer to cook, does not mean that it will do a better job of keeping your counters stocked. In fact, generally speaking, the longer a recipe takes to cook, the less efficient it is. Humorously enough, you could set all your machines to make a single batch of Coffee overnight, which would finish in 5 minutes and leave your machines idle for about 8 hours, and still end up with more food after 8 hours than you would if you had cooked Chocolate Marshmallows for 8 solid hours. Poor quantity producers, such as Chocolate Marshmallow and many others, will not keep your counters full because they produce such a low quantity of product in relation to their cook time that your customers will eat all of the previous batch before you can put new food on your counters. If you make sure to stock your counters only with high yield per hour items, it will be much easier to keep your counters full of food and your customers happy. 'Spreading Yourself Too Thin' But this is only one aspect of keeping your counters full. Another aspect relates to how you play the game. Do you cook a different item on each appliance, or two items here, three items there, and so forth? If so, it is unlikely that you will be able to maintain a constant stock on your counters, because you're spreading your efforts too thin. If keeping your counters stocked all the time is a goal of yours, you will need to "superstock" each counter before moving onto the next. This means utilizing all available appliances to produce the same recipe. This is a much more efficient way to keep items in stock, versus putting a few different items out here and there. In the same vein as spreading one's efforts too thin by cooking a different item on each appliance, only keeping a few counters with items on them can also spread your efforts too thin. If we consider that, given a certain customer satisfaction rating, the consumption rate per hour is fixed, we can see that with only a few counters available for our customers to choose from, those counters will sell out much more quickly than if we had, say, 15 stocked counters for the customers to choose from. This is because the more stocked counters that we keep, the more we diffuse the effect of consumption on each counter. In other words, having a greater number of counters with food items on them results in a slower reduction of stock per counter. Now obviously, we don't want to have an excessive number of counters; however, there is always a "sweet spot" that you can find in terms of the best number of counters for you. This "sweet spot" will be a moving target, as it is affected by different factors such as how many appliances you have at the time, how often you can check into the game and switch your food, which foods you like to cook, and so forth. Sometimes in order to accomplish a full stock-up initially, we may need to block our door for a period of time so that we can stock our counters in peace, without having hungry customers come through and thwart our efforts. 'Pacing Yourself With Tasks' Also, do you jump at all tasks? This is another aspect. We get one new regular task from each quest giver once per level, and one timed task per level. Here is where time management comes into play. If you budget your time appropriately, you will be able to complete each regular and timed task for each level, and also be able to keep your "regular" counters in stock. I complete every task, but I also try not to let those "regular" item quantities drop below 10,000 per counter. When they drop much below that, I take a break from the task, restock my items, and then resume the task. I still complete each task every level, but I pace myself so that I don't run out of all my "pretty" foods in the meantime. As a side note, does this mean that since I never let my counters fully sell out that I am missing out on some profit? The short answer to that is, "yes." But it also boils down to each person's play style and preferences. By accepting the facts that: (a) I will be constantly spending gold to produce items, and (b) I won't ever realize the full profit from stocked counters, but I will maintain a constant revenue stream from them, I can analyze the data in a different way that tells me which items are most profitable, given how I like to play. But that gets into the statistics area that I indicated was a discussion for another day. 'General Time Management' Lastly, we have time management. One way to ensure that counters remain full is to employ good time management skills. This means, if I know that I'm going to see an evening client for an hour, then do my own weight training for an hour, then run for 45 minutes, then come home to shower, cook and serve dinner which will take an hour and 15 minutes, that's 4 hours in which I will not be checking the game. In this case, I must consider what my best choice of recipes to cook is before leaving the house. Obviously, I won't want to cook a 1-hour, 2-hour or 3-hour recipe in that time, as that would leave my appliances with a lot of downtime in which they won't be producing anything. Similarly, I wouldn't want to start long recipes that would end after my bedtime, as that would also leave a lot of downtime during the night. A 4-to-5 hour recipe would probably be my best choice, and I'd choose a high quantity producer within that amount of time. I try to plan my recipes around my obligations for each day. Some days, I can check into the game every couple of hours. Conversely, some days, I can only check into the game once or twice. No matter how long I have, I try to be mindful of always keeping my appliances busy with efficient items. This type of time management helps immensely with keeping counters stocked. Of course, none of us can do this perfectly. We will all have periods of time wherein our recipes have finished cooking, but we can't get to our devices to switch them out. And that's totally expected, and totally okay. But if keeping counters stocked is your goal, a little mindfulness goes a long way. Within whatever time frame you have to work with, there will be recipe choices that are more optimal than others, depending on your goals. 'Conclusion' I really hope that this post helps friends and neighbors with the question of how to keep counters stocked. I apologize for the potentially overwhelming length of this post; however, I wanted to try and take enough time to explain things as best I could. In doing so, I realized that the topic was a little more in-depth than I had originally anticipated. In summary: choose efficient quantity producing recipes, do not stretch your production capacity too thin by producing different recipes on each appliance, maintain a variety of stocked counters, and budget your time as best you can. In the future, I will be adding tables to this site which give an analysis of each recipe, so that you can easily see the efficiency of each recipe. __FORCETOC__ 'How Do I Earn More Gold?' in progress